I created my profile yesterday and was able to immediately start submitting proposals, so I sent out a few. This morning I got a notification that my profile was approved and that I could now start submitting proposals. After some reading on here, I realize that it seems that you're not supposed to be able to submit proposals before being approved.

Is there any way to know if my previously submitted proposals can actually be seen by the job posters? I just want to make sure they didn't end up in some kind of void because they were sent before I was approved.

Go to the main page. Under "Find Work" there is a tab that says "Proposals". Your proposals should be there. I suspect your profile was approved when you submitted them and the notification was just delayed for some reason.

Thanks for your reply. I do see them there, that's a good sign. I haven't received any kind of feedback at all from any of the job posters though, so I can't confirm that they can see them too. I guess I'll wait and see.

More often that not, you will send proposals and never hear anything back. Don't worry about. Just submit to jobs that you know you can do really well and tailor your proposal to that specific job. It takes a good while to get going - don't get discouraged. Be sure you read everything about how the platform works, how you get paid, the Terms of Services and everything else so you don't get scammed.

Thank you so much for your advice, Mary. I appreciate you taking the time to help out a newbie.

I'll be sure to follow it - especially the bit about being scammed.

The key appears to be in avoiding jobs that request off-platform payments. I have a question about how to handle payments that may not fit within the structure of the bid forms I've seen in job posts. This just occurred to me, so forgive me the answer is available elsewhere. I figure I'll ask here before I look, double my chances of getting a good answer.

I offer a maintenance plan that has an annual fee. Usually I'll offer it at the end of a project. Up until now, I've accepted several forms of payment, including PayPal, Interac e-Transfer, etc. If I manage to land a client on Upwork, I'd like to keep the payments within Upwork to avoid these issues with scammers. My question is twofold: is there a way to charge for upsales and is there a way to create a recurring payment? The recurrent payments do not need to be automated, so as long as there is a way to create a new charge for it upon renewal, it should work.

Thank you so much for your advice, Mary. I appreciate you taking the time to help out a newbie.

I'll be sure to follow it - especially the bit about being scammed.

The key appears to be in avoiding jobs that request off-platform payments. I have a question about how to handle payments that may not fit within the structure of the bid forms I've seen in job posts. This just occurred to me, so forgive me the answer is available elsewhere. I figure I'll ask here before I look, double my chances of getting a good answer.

I offer a maintenance plan that has an annual fee. Usually I'll offer it at the end of a project. Up until now, I've accepted several forms of payment, including PayPal, Interac e-Transfer, etc. If I manage to land a client on Upwork, I'd like to keep the payments within Upwork to avoid these issues with scammers. My question is twofold: is there a way to charge for upsales and is there a way to create a recurring payment? The recurrent payments do not need to be automated, so as long as there is a way to create a new charge for it upon renewal, it should work.

Thanks again for your time!

Upsales: not really, no.

Recurring: Yes, but it's not used much, most users do not know about it, and even fewer clients know about it. And most clients, if they did know, would not go for it.

Upwork is not really set up to do either of those things, and trying to do either here is going to be very frustrating. I advise you to go READ (yea, that's right, READ). the many support pages that discuss PAYMENTS.

Which if course, you should do even if you did not have a specific reason.